Cutbacks restricting career guidance

THE legal rights of teen-agers to appropriate career and education guidance are being restricted by government cutbacks, the head of the country’s guidance counsellors has said.

Since January, second-level schools have had limits placed on the number of hours of supervision substitution is allowed per week to cover teacher absences on official business or on uncertified sick leave.

Institute of Guidance Counsellors (IGC) president Eilis Coakley said the cutbacks in supervision have made it impossible for guidance counsellors tied into blocked timetables to be released at all.

“It is a matter of grave concern that students aren’t getting the appropriate guidance guaranteed them by the 1998 Education Act, as it becomes impossible to attend career events, local and national, college open days and industry visits,” said Ms Coakley.

“These links are a vital part of the process of helping students make informed decisions about their futures. The cutbacks are short-sighted and will have lasting effects into the future,” Ms Coakley told the IGC annual conference in Kilkenny.

She said guidance counsellors in schools are identifying students with concerns and worries, and teenagers are being faced for the first time in their lives with lowering their expectations instead of raising them.

With the possibility of fees in some format returning for college students, maybe as soon as next autumn, Ms Coakley said society has been distracted from the debate about the need for increased third level funding by arguments about millionaires getting free fees for their children.

“The real debate is not whether the millionaire or billionaire pays fees for his or her 2.4 children but what they pay towards the funding of a quality education system which can sustain us all into the future and that is also the question for all of us,” she said.